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Finalrun

Spec-driven testing using English and vision for mobile apps

Details

External ID
47676044
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Finalrun
Website domain
github.com
Launched
April 7, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
28
Upvotes percentile
0.7892030848329049
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

I wanted to test mobile apps in plain English instead of relying on brittle selectors like XPath or accessibility IDs.With a vision-based agent, that part actually works well. It can look at the screen, understand intent, and perform actions across Android and iOS.The bigger problem showed up around how tests are defined and maintained.When test flows are kept outside the codebase (written manually or generated from PRDs), they quickly go out of sync with the app. Keeping them updated becomes a lot of effort, and they lose reliability over time.I then tried generating tests directly from the codebase (via MCP). That improved sync, but introduced high token usage and slower generation.The shift for me was realizing test generation shouldn’t be a one-off step. Tests need to live alongside the codebase so they stay in sync and have more context.I kept the execution vision-based (no brittle selectors), but moved test generation closer to the repo.I’ve open sourced the core pieces:1. generate tests from codebase context 2. YAML-based test flows 3. Vision-based execution across Android and iOSRepo: https://github.com/final-run/finalrun-agent Demo: https://youtu.be/rJCw3p0PHr4In the Demo video, you’ll see the "post-development hand-off." An AI builds a feature in an IDE, and Finalrun immediately generates and executes a vision-based test for it verifying the feature developed by AI.

Enrichment

Theme
AI agent frameworks and developer tools
Vertical
—
Function
Dev tools
Audience
Developer
AI stance
AI feature
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
mobile app testing using natural language
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Partial While prompting an LLM with screenshots to parse instructions is simple, building reliable cross-platform mobile automation (Android/iOS device orchestration, low-latency screen capture, input injection, and flake-resistant state verification) requires specialized infrastructure.

What it would actually take: The architecture requires an orchestration backend paired with device runners (Appium/UIAutomator2 for Android, XCUITest for iOS, or cloud device farms). The hard problems are real-time screenshot-to-action latency, handling unpredictable animation timing, dynamic permission prompts, and coordinate scaling across fragmented screen resolutions. Deep mobile OS internals and robust test harness development expertise are required.

Discussion

15 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Playwright, Google and Facebook monorepos

Concerns raised: Flaky tests with web automation, Test drift between external generation and active codebase, Stale tests when mobile UI layouts change drastically, Generated test code persistence and accuracy

Feature requests: IDE integration for test generation, Verification with video, console logs, and network logs for web, Automatic YAML regeneration without manual tweaking

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 32 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #7 of 33 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 155 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product